Natural State Dog Training

03/03/2025

Getting dogs off leash and in the woods is so important. This is still one of my favorite things I get to do with dogs. It’s giving them time with peace and quiet to just be a dog and it has a huge impact on their state of mind.
Side note- one thing I routinely see people do that I do not do is use recall around the house for every little thing. I see people telling their dog “come” from 2 ft away. To me that dilutes the command. I’m not saying you can’t ask them to come to you but how is important. There are a number of ways to ask them to come near from a pat on the leg to an informal “come here girl” that work just fine when it’s not urgent. I want recall or the formal “come” command to be fast and reliable and so I want the dog to believe that it is urgent, because it is.

03/01/2025

02/14/2025

This is Penny. She is one of the sweetest dogs I have ever met, and she’s also pretty timid. A lot of her program is centered around building confidence. And where did we start? Play
This spot is a lot of things to us. We come here to play every day. Because of that, she feels great here. She’s anticipating good things. So it’s a great place to introduce new concepts that she might have struggled with before. Today we are using it as a recovery spot. She got pretty spooked in the neighborhood by a big truck and trailer. So we are here, doing what she loves, and bringing confidence back to baseline.

01/24/2025

It’s funny how different my lessons look now from when I first started training dogs. In the beginning, right out of the gate I was focused on teaching behaviors. Lots of repetitions. I still cared greatly how the dogs felt but I thought starting the work was the best way to impact how they felt. Now I would say it’s the opposite. I spend much less time teaching behaviors and I don’t do near the repetitions. The majority of our time together is focused on fulfillment through exploring off leash,play, and just hanging out. Once their needs are met learning comes pretty easy. If I had a “training” goal in this lesson it was to work on recall. We spent approximately 30 minutes exploring, 10 minutes playing frisbee, and I gave him exactly 1 recall command. We will do more work today but this is typically how we start it.

01/19/2025

Early morning fun with my boy Boone.

01/03/2025

This is Boone, a new board and train that I picked up yesterday. Today we had our first outing. I took him to some of the places we will be working later just to explore. He was curious about everything. Little unsure but still wanted to check things out. Best thing for me to do there is stay out of his way and let him.

12/17/2024

Sunday loves middle, especially when you’re not asking for it

12/08/2024

I just finished up a great week in Kentucky working with Larry Krohn. I’ve been consuming his content for years and went to one of his seminars but this one on one time was priceless. I would highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel for anyone wanting to learn more. I brought my dog Luna and Maverick who did training with me a year ago and they both had a blast. I even got to play tug with his dog Dante and Roadie the Rottweiler who belongs to a client of his. I’ve been very fortunate with great mentors through my career and this was no exception.

12/03/2024

Puppy consults are so much fun. I met this little one yesterday. Her owners reached out before they got her so I was able to be there the day after they brought her home. It is so much easier on the dog and owner to start off right before bad habits start. I’m eager to watch them progress.

10/23/2024

Bringing River along through play has been a really fun process. She was always into play but her game of “keep away” wasn’t much fun for her owner. So I had to show her that there was more value in cooperative play than in doing her own thing. Tug was an easy start. That’s what increased the value of bringing the toy back. Then it was pretty easy to start playing tug with the frisbee and then throwing it with a tug ending. Now we have a fun game.

10/19/2024

River is about 12 days into her program. We’ve been working on all the usual stuff and she is coming along well. One of the things her owner really wanted to be able to do with her was to toss a frisbee and have her bring it back. Good news is she loves to chase a frisbee. Bad news is she is an expert at keep away because she finds that game to be a blast. This clip was from one of our first lessons. All I wanted was for her to have fun with me to connect. Then I will show her a game that is way more fun than keep away. More to come

10/07/2024

This is River. I just picked her up for the board and train and I think she was trying to hit the snooze button.

09/14/2024

How do you feel about exposing your dog to stress?

This young Weimaraner started a board and train recently. During the drop off, I informed his owner, he'd be living under some different rules at my house than what he'd been used to for the past few months of his life.

He would be subjected to some "healthy stress.”

Among other things, he would be sleeping in a crate at night, learning to walk nicely on a leash, and participate in proprioceptive exercises to build body awareness.

Essentially, he would be learning some problem solving skills and because of it, develop greater resilience.

The first day here he found himself stuck on the opposite side of a pole than the side I was on.

Can you guess what I did?

I did nothing. I stood there, not moving, not applying more pressure to the leash, not coochie-cooing him...I just waited.

It took him about 90 seconds of wiggling, and whining to figure out what to do to get himself free.

Once he did, he was darn proud of himself, prancing about for a few seconds and then we moved on and enjoyed a short game of fetch.

The stress was short lived. He learned how to relieve it and was proud of himself as he discovered his power to problem solve.

We do our dogs no favor by immediately bailing them out of every little problem or struggle they encounter.

So often I hear, "My dog doesn't like the crate,” or "My dog doesn't like to be brushed,” or "My dog won't potty while on leash.”

As a woman who has raised two (now grown) children, I could not have imagined saying to my kids dentist..."well, they don't like having their teeth brushed so we just gave up." 🤣

I have news for you, there are very few dogs that immediately enjoy their crate, or being brushed and bathed, or being restrained on a leash.

It's our job to teach them to tolerate the realities of life in the human world.

For most things the teaching recipe is simple:

A bit of skill, applied over time, mixed by a healthy dose of patient persistence.

If you don't have the skill, the time or the patience, you can pay people like me to do the foundation work for you. It is like having the dentist clean the kids teeth...but if you don't maintain what the professional did, it's not going to become good habits that serve for a lifetime.

The main thing to understand is that stress and learning will be part of life. There is no avoiding it. It is how we learn to work through it that makes the difference.

By taking time to teach your dog how to tolerate some stress and learn to problem solve, you set them up for increased confidence, improved manners and an overall healthier mindset.

09/12/2024

This is Hudson. He’s the last of the sheepadoodle brothers. We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough and it came through play once again. But it didn’t start that way. Most of the time I am trying to find a way to connect with the dog through play first which then helps with trust as we start the work. That’s how it was with his brother Oliver. Once he revealed how much he loved to be chased we played daily and that’s how we connected to do the work. But when Hudson got here I could not get him to engage in play and neither could Luna. He was scared of every toy I brought out. So with him it was doing the work that built trust which freed him up enough to play. Now he loves it. His favorite reward is this particular stick. Play and joy are crucial for all of us. Whether it comes at the beginning of the program or towards the end is not as important to me as long as we get there.

08/28/2024

This is Presley. He’s the 2nd of three brothers coming here for training. Oliver is home and doing well and Hudson gets here tomorrow.

08/26/2024

It’s amazing what can happen when we focus on the relationship first before jumping straight to the problems on the walk or obedience. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching obedience but neither dog trusted me. In the consult they were both threatening. So we met out in a park to work on things the dogs find relevant. We explored. I had the owners take the dogs to trees, signs, light poles or anything else interesting to sniff. We jumped up on things like tables and benches. Then we switched to an exercise called follow the dog that I learned from Nelson Hodges. The owners did an amazing job. By the end the dogs were “with” the owners. In the last picture Ascot decided to lay next to me when he wouldn’t come near me before. Now we have something to work with.

08/06/2024

Play is so important. Most of the time when we think of play it’s tug or fetch. Those games are great but there are so many more aspects to play and each individual dog decides which ones they enjoy. For Oliver it’s being chased. We were there to work on recall and he did great with that but this moment was way more impactful for our relationship.